[jack-o-bytes]

I have an old ish computer with no SATA plugs. I am wondering whether buying a SATA RAID card meens that I can have SATA hard drives or whether it just meens that I can have extra sockets if my motherboard already has RAID.

Any Help Apreciated

Thanking in advance

Jack-O-Bytes

[jack-o-bytes]

Bump, any ideas any one?

[crjdriver]

First of all, bumping a thread 26min after you post a question is NOT going to win you any friends.

Next to answer your question; a sata raid controller will support raid and non-raid drives. As an example if you have a four port controller, you can have two drives in raid1 and two drives that are not part of the array for a total of four drives connected to the controller.

One last word of advise; do not buy a cheap raid controller. A quality raid card is going to cost as much as a high end motherboard ie $150 or more. If you just want sata connections, you can buy a sata controller card [non-raid] for less than half the price of the raid card. Again you will see many of the $20 controller cards. Using one of those type of cards is asking for a problem.

[jack-o-bytes]

So what you are saying is that if I want some SATA plugs in my computer I can buy a SATA controller card and just plug it into a pci slot. But only buy ones that are more expensive because cheap ones are rubbish.

[crjdriver]

Correct. You do understand that you will need to install the driver[s] for the card before you can access any drives connected to the controller card.

[jack-o-bytes]

Yeah, Thats great thanks mate. Sorry for the bump earlier.